News Release

“60 Minutes” Highlights Saudi Atrocity in Yemen, Ignores U.S. Role in It

November 20, 2017

GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com, @GarethPorter
Independent investigative journalist Porter has written many pieces on Yemen including “The U.S. Provided Cover for the Saudi Starvation Strategy in Yemen.” He said today: “The political pressure on Trump to break with [Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman] is growing rapidly. ’60 Minutes’ had the first hard-hitting U.S. television report on the atrocity in Yemen with heart-rending footage of starving children and clear identification of Saudi responsibility. … What’s missing from the segment of course is U.S. responsibility for the Saudi war. Nevertheless the politics of the issue are now changing rapidly.” See “60 Minutes” segment from Sunday night here.

SHIREEN AL-ADEIMI, sha980 at mail.harvard.edu, @shireen818
Al-Adeimi is a doctoral candidate and instructor at Harvard University. She recently wrote the piece “Only Americans Can Stop America’s War on Yemen,” which states: “Yemen continues to suffer in silence as the world turns away from its ongoing misery. Despite two and a half years of brutal war, the average American remains oblivious to the inconvenient truth that the United States has been helping Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates destroy a sovereign country that posed a threat to no one. While rich Arab states bombard the Middle East’s poorest country, creating the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and an unprecedented cholera outbreak, our government (starting with the Obama administration and continuing with Trump’s) has continued to support them not only through the sale of weapons, but also through mid-air refueling, targeting intelligence, and other logistical support.”

DEREK DAVISON, davisond13 at gmail.com, @dwdavison9318
Davison is a Washington-based researcher and writer on international affairs and American politics. He previously worked in the Persian Gulf for The RAND Corporation.He just wrote the piece “‘60 Minutes’ Imagines A Different War In Yemen,” which states: “It is no exaggeration to say that the Saudi operation in Yemen depends on this ongoing logistical support from the U.S. It also depends on arms, like American cluster bombs and British missiles, that U.S. and U.K. arms dealers eagerly sell to the Saudis. Which means that it’s within American and British power to end this atrocity, to end the starvation, to force the Saudis to reopen the entire country to humanitarian aid. But whether it’s because they believe Saudi propaganda about Iran or they’re simply too invested in maintaining their toxic but very lucrative relationships with the Saudi monarchy, neither Washington nor London has taken any substantive steps to end or even reduce their involvement in immiserating the Yemeni people.

“Which somehow all seems to have escaped ’60 Minutes,’ which devoted not so much as a single sentence of its Yemen segment to explaining how America and Britain are partly responsible for the many images of starving children their viewers were seeing on Sunday night. This is certainly not a new phenomenon in Western media, which has made a habit of downplaying or outright ignoring American and British involvement in Yemen. But it is still a stunning omission. The program’s American audience deserves to know that its own government in part created the atrocities that flashed by on the screen. In failing to inform them of that fact, ’60 Minutes’ did its viewers, and the people of Yemen, a tremendous disservice.”